Scott MacDougall offers a proposal for recovering the
'more' to communion and ecclesiology to aid in imagining a church not
beyond the world (as in Zizioulas) or over against the world (as in
Milbank), but in and for the world in love and service. This concept is
worked out in conversation with systematic theologians such as Jürgen
Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Johannes Baptist Metz, and by
engaging with a theology of Christian practices currently being
developed by such as Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra. The potential
for the church to become a vehicle for love and service can be realised
when it anticipate God's promised perfection in the communions between
God, humanity, and the rest of creation.
Zizioulas' and Milbank's theologies of the church are both marked by an
overly realised sense of the impending end of the world (eschatology).
As a result, their theology fails to acknowledge the potential for good
the time-frame a theology of eschatology can have on influencing how
people act. This focus on the impact of the ending of the world is
further connected to both theologians' devaluation of material creation
and history, privileging of institutions, the restrictive and closed
concept of the church, and reduction of ecclesial practice essential to
eucharist.

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About Me

I am the editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies; author of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy; a tenured associate professor and chairman of the Dept. of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana; and a subdeacon of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) resident in the Eparchy of St. Nicholas of Chicago.